b you got," and waved a hand toward the hovering children.

"Sir," replied the young scholar, "is it not the better to do whilse
it is the mo' tough? The mo' toughness, the mo' honor." He rose
suddenly, brushed back the dry, brown locks of his fine hair, and
extending both hands, with his limp straw hat dangling in one, said:
"Sir, I will ask you; is not the schoolmaster the true patriot? Shall
his honor be less than that of the soldier? Yet I ask not honor; for
me, I am not fit; yet, after my poor capacities"--He resumed his seat.

An awesome quiet followed. Then some one spoke to him, too low to be
heard. He bent forward to hear the words repeated, and 'Mian said for
the timorous speaker:--

"Aw, dass nut'n; he jis only say, 'Is M'sieu' Walleece big-in to
gryne?'"

Few tarried long, though one man--he whom the schoolmaster had found
sitting on the roadside with Maximian--staid all day; and even among
the villagers themselves there was almost no loquacity. Maximian, it
is true, as the afternoon wore along, and it seemed plain that the
reception was a great and spontaneous success, spoke with growing
frequency and heartiness; and, when the guest sat down alone at a
table within, where _la vieille_--the wife--was placing half-a-dozen
still sputtering fried eggs, a great wheaten loaf, a yellow gallon
bowl of boiled milk, a pewter ladle, a bowie-knife, the blue tumbler,
and a towel; and out on the galerie the callers were still coming: his
simple neighbors pardoned the elation that led him to take a chair
himself a little way off, sit on it sidewise, cross his legs gayly,
and with a smile and wave of his good brown hand say:--

"_Servez-vous!_ He'p you'se'f! Eat much you like; till you swell up!"

Even he asked no questions. Only near the end of the day, when the
barefoot children by gradual ventures had at length gathered close about
and were softly pushing for place on his knees, and huddling under his
arms, and he was talking French,--the only language most of them
knew,--he answered the first personal inquiry put to him since arriving.
"His name," he replied to the tiny, dark, big-eyed boy who spoke for his
whispering fellows, "his name was Bonaventure--Bonaventure Deschamps."

As the great October sun began to dip his crimson wheel behind the low
black line of swamp, and the chapel cross stood out against a band of
yellow light that spanned the west, he walked out to see the village,
a little girl on either han